Samsung Begins Production of Xbox 360 Graphics Tech

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By Andrew Burnes

It's all Swiss to me:

Mueez Deen, director of graphics for the U.S. semiconductor unit of Samsung, said it has begun high-volume manufacturing of a 512-megabit graphics DDR3 memory chip for use in gaming consoles and personal computers.

Samsung's move to mass produce the chips comes several months ahead of the arrival of Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360, the first major device that will depend on the DDR3 powered chip.

By being first into mass production, Samsung stands to win a big chunk of the early market for these chips. But with the introduction of Microsoft's console still months away, Samsung rivals have time to reach volume production as well, analyst Dean McCaron of market forecaster Mercury Research said.

The chips run at top speeds of 1.6 gigabits. When several of the chips are arrayed together in a graphics card to run inside gaming devices, they can achieve data transfer speeds of 6.4 gigabytes, or billions of bytes, per second.

In addition, Samsung said it is starting to develop a 2.0 gigabit per second GDDR3 (graphics double data rate 3) chip that can process graphics 50 percent faster than the 512 megabit chip now in mass production. When 2.0-gigabit chips are mounted together on a graphics card they can achieve 8.0 gigabyte-per-second speeds.